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How (it seems) I came to be tattooed in the house of W**** R**** in the Old City of Jerusalem.

It was the sour stench of tear gas
rising up the steps of David Street
from the alleys of the Christian Quarter.
It was the Border Guards beating
their prisoners after Friday prayers.
It was the blueness of sky,
it was the air-powered hiss of bus doors,
it was dein goldenes Haar, Margarete.
It was a haircut at the barbershop
in the Muslim Quarter,
it was the date (1714) on the ironstone house
in which my father was born.
It was Karl Marx writing
that the worker has no homeland,
it was the failure of the Enlightenment,
it was the McMahon correspondence,
it was the Balfour Declaration,
it was a Yemeni girl on Kibbutz Shomrat.
It was the coastal plain seen
from the Galilee highlands,
it was arriving in Nazareth,
it was tomatoes growing in sand
in the Wilderness of Zin,
it was George McRae singing Rock your baby.
It was the gold teeth of Bedouin girls,
it was kif on the Lebanese border,
it was the greyness of England,
it was looking for work in Tiberias.
It was her name scratched on a hotel wall,
it was passing through deserts in buses,
it was the rest-stop near Yad Mordechai,
it was a signpost to El Arish,
it was the panic of an animal in front of a fire.
It was the indiscriminate pursuit of affection.
It was the footsteps of a priest.
It was mist at dawn on the Jaffa Road,
it was the stars seen from the desert at night,
it was the chemicals in the hair dye,
it was the sound of earth landing on the pine.
It was the strength people need.
It was the evening
and the black walls of the passageway.
It was the blind man on the Via Dolorosa,
it was haji painted above the shop doors,
it was the mother suffocating her baby
to protect it from fedayeen.
It was not knowing the names of trees.
It was being afraid of snakes,
it was not knowing the names of birds,
it was organophosphates in the orchard,
it was poor sight in the dark,
it was the mirrors turned to the wall,
it was the streetlamp’s small circle of light.
It was the loneliness of people who believe they believe,
it was the hopelessness of choirs,
it was the smell of stone and wood in churches.
It was the callousness of killers,
it was the casual cruelty of soldiers,
it was arrested development,
it was abortions we procured.
It was Graham who died at four,
it was the fearful child’s bedroom,
it was the abusive neighbour,
it was everything that has ever happened.

Maybe that’s when you know you’re old,when they turn to you when another kidgoes missing, and they turn to you when the manhunt is on the tv news and you see the hedges being beaten and parted with long sticks and you look intently at everyone you can see at the scene, and everyonein all the photos they show of all the other scenes in the missing girl’s or boy’s life, and maybe there’s a fat guy or a tall guy or a woman smoking a cigarette so hungrily, and people say to me “do you think they did it?” and sometimes I do or sometimes I don’t or someone else in the montage of scenes appears more than once and even on a still photo has an air about them above and beyond that of mere pose.

The intensity of what it is to be human is somehow evidently leaking from them, something has become disabled, some protective function, and despite the voluntary unspoken pact never to speak of such things – for what good would it do – medical treatments get sold. But all that aside, that trait didn’t make someone guilty of visiting an ultimate brutality on another and anyway my success rate from the armchair was pretty good, I’d say. No character type is immune from exercising savagery. And with suspicions comes discussion, extrapolation, escalation.

It could be that I felt weary because as I watched the sticks beating the bushes I just didn’t care who did it. I was doing my best not to think about it at all. I no longer wanted to discuss stuff like this, no more than I wanted to make a case for Easton Ellis having surely had to retreat into an intense interior life for quite some timein order to bring back what Bateman liked to do in detail and questions of whether this interior would have beenhugely sexual, or anyway masturbatory. I’m not a theorist.

But you, reader, know how this is. You have found yourselftalking about Neruda again. You are hoping by the endshe will love IfYou Forget Me but know too that shewill forget you and you will forget her.You will heal of each other and recedeto scar tissue which is fine and pale and stilleven after the sun. No one has a bodylike hers, her map of psychic wounds. Crossed swordseverywhere, the arrowheads to the heart, the broken snappedarrow shafts like porcupine spears. She may knowyou are plotting again when youhear your own voice asking her if she’s read him, that man, Neruda.

We’ve all done it, surely, lived these odeswhere the thing is one day, two things.I forgot where I lived, even the name of the town.Maybe that’s when you know you’re old,even when they are looking for missing people,even when she rang and talked about her boyfriend,even when there were cities I wanted to seefor some sort of beauty I imagined existed there,even when those intelligent guessers say that theyhave discovered the start of something,even with my knuckles white on the steering wheel,I would go to the woods and stand naked and stillamong the trees, hoping someone would see me

Thank you for your letter alerting me to the “dreadful review” of my poems in the What’s on this weekend page of the Goring Flaneur. I am guessing that you may be disappointed to learn that you weren’t the first to let me know that yet another nonentity regards my literary output as “utterly without merit”.

It just so happens that I was reading Borges when news arrived from the sharpened tongue of my friend and chief detractor Scamander that no less a judge than the poetaster Tarquin Feather (!!) had criticised my output as lightweight, dull and dead. As soon as he uttered the name of Feather I had less doubt than the narrator of The Gospel According to Mark that a crucifixion was to be attempted. If you had been there to see and hear me conducting my defence, and if you are at least…